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Microsoft, Crytek largely dismiss DirectX 10.1

Microsoft and Crytek have both opened fire on DirectX 10.1, with Microsoft …

AMD has spent the last few weeks touting the new features incorporated into the upcoming Radeon HD 3800 series, and chief among these has been support for the DirectX 10.1 standard. NVIDIA isn't planning to take this lying down, and the company is already preparing to launch a 256MB GeForce 8800GT. As reported by Tech Report, NVIDIA announced the cut-down GT yesterday—and took the opportunity to launch an attack on the importance of DirectX 10.1, as well by distributing the following quotes.

According to Kevin Unangst, Microsoft's senior global director of the Games on Windows division, "DX10.1 is an incremental update that won’t affect any games or gamers in the near future." That, in and of itself, isn't so terrible—in fact, it's entirely true when you consider the lag time between DirectX releases and software that takes full advantage of the new features—but it was Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, who delivered the nastiest shot, saying:

"We pride ourselves on being the first to adopt any important new technology that can improve our games so you would expect us to get with
DX10.1 right away, but we've looked at it and there's just nothing in it important enough to make it needed. So we have no plans to use it at all, not
even in the future."

Although the remarks from Crytek, in particular, are damning, it's important to remember the source. NVIDIA is scarcely going to talk up a feature they don't have and don't intend to include in the near future, and they're not going to distribute quotes from any game developer saying anything positive about the new standard. The coders at the Beyond3D forums seem generally interested in DirectX 10.1, even while acknowledging that yes, it is an incremental update and not a fundamentally new standard.

Ultimately, I agree much more with Microsoft than Crytek. DirectX 10.1 support isn't going to affect gamers in the near future, but developers have almost always eventually embraced new standard capabilities if those capabilities offered any sort of benefit. Since consumers will typically assume that DirectX 10.1 support is better than DirectX 10 support (after all, it's higher isn't it?), the standard is likely to eventually make an appearance on the market, even if its not a major debut.